From: benj gerdes (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Oct 26 2009 - 19:30:18 PDT
Dear List,
I missed posting these screenings to the weekly listings. NYC-area
frameworkers please come check out:
Michael Gitlin's "The Earth is Young" (58 minutes, 2009)
Thursday October 29, 7:30 PM
MIchael Gitlin and Jim Supanick in Conversation
The Politics of Abstraction!: Informe, Ecstasy, Image
Friday October 30, 8PM
Curated by Brian McCarthy
more information below and even more information on our website: www.16beavergroup.org
. scroll down to bottom of this email for directions.
best,
benj gerdes
___________________________________________________
Thursday 10.29.09 – The Earth is Young – Michael Gitlin with Jim
Supanick
CONTENTS:
1. About this Thursday
2. About "The Earth is Young"
3. About Michael Gitlin
4. About Jim Supanick
5. Useful links
___________________________________________________
1. About this Thursday
What: Screening and Discussion
When: Thursday 10.29.09
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 7:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all
We are excited to host a screening and discussion around Michael
Gitlin's
most recent video "The Earth is Young." It follows many conversations we
have had about documentary, politics, communication, and science, but
differs in subject and approach. Across a great ideological difference,
there is a kinship between the amateur research depicted in his project
and many of the cultural practices we support and valorize, also often
outside the mainstream. There is a question then of recognizing the
energy
and investments of others while contesting or disputing their
conclusions,
as well as a much broader question of how facts and understanding are
presently constituted for a large number of people in the United States.
Following the film, Jim Supanick will lead a discussion with Michael and
the rest of us about this and other questions.
___________________________________________________
2. About "The Earth is Young"
The Earth Is Young (2009, 58 min., digital video)
The Earth Is Young takes as its starting point a series of interviews
conducted with Young Earth Creationists, who find evidence of a six-day,
six-thousand-year old creation in their reading of the fossil and
geological record. The film frames these encounters with depictions of
the
slow and patient work of young paleontologists, and the strange,
shimmering life in a drop of pond water, both of which point toward a
world far older and more complex, if no less fantastic.
Bordering on a kind of science-fiction film, The Earth Is Young is an
essay about the nature of science, and about the tools, both physical
and
ideological, with which one builds a model of the world.
___________________________________________________
3. About Michael Gitlin
Michael Gitlin's work has been screened at numerous venues, including
the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Toronto International Film
Festival,
the Full Frame Documentary Festival, the New York Video Festival at
Lincoln Center and the 1997 Whitney Biennial. His film, The
Birdpeople, is
in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He is the
recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has also been
supported by the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the
Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Gitlin received an
M.F.A.
from Bard College. He teaches at Hunter College in New York City.
___________________________________________________
4. About Jim Supanick
Jim Supanick is a videomaker and writer born in Cleveland, OH and
currently based in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been exhibited in museums,
galleries, and festivals, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Dia Art
Foundation, Thomas Erben Gallery, L.A. Freewaves, and PDX Festival, and
has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the
Experimental Television Center, and the Puffin Foundation. His essays on
film, video, and contemporary art have appeared in exhibition catalogs
and
publications such as Film Comment, Millennium Film Journal, The Wire,
Film
International, Cineaste, and The Brooklyn Rail. Jim’s writing has
received
support from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Creative
Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Program. He currently teaches at
City College, The New School, and Brooklyn College.
___________________________________________________
5. Useful links
http://michaelgitlin.com/
http://supanickblog.blogspot.com/
___________________________________________________
___________________________________________________
Friday 10.30.09 – The Politics of Abstraction!: Informe, Ecstasy, Image
CONTENTS:
1. About this Friday
2. Films to be screened
3. Topics to be discussed/not discussed
4. About Brian McCarthy
5. About Marie Menken
___________________________________________________
1. About this Friday
What: Site specific film performance
When: Friday 10.30.09
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 8:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all
Tonight is the first in a four-part series investigating the role of
abstract and affective processes in a contemporary revolutionary
politics,
featuring performances and experimental film and video. The evenings
will
mix lecture elements with screenings in order to recontextualize select
works from the experimental film and video canon, and set them to work
for
an idiosyncratic, aleatory political activism.
The films shown in the screening tonight – selections from the American,
British, and Japanese avant-gardes along with work from contemporary
filmmakers such as Bradley Eros, David Baker, and Stom Sogo – will serve
as didactic tools and points of departure to construct a narrative of
aesthetic/political Passage, into which the writings of others - Jean
Epstein, Robert Smithson, Mike Kelley, and Hollis Frampton, for
example -
will intervene.
Abstraction and the informe as evolutionary principles; the biological
and
mimetic desire; film as ritual; the timeless and political ecstasy. To
trace a conceptual line between these sources as an act of paracinematic
performance.
Abstract film serves here as a focal point in which to investigate the
importance of the ecstatic in a contemporary revolutionary politics,
with
a particular focus on contemporary Marxist theory, as a continuation of
some of the ideas – exodus, aesthetic autonomy, recomposition, and
spiritual exhaustion – raised in Bifo Berardi’s recent seminar at
16beaver.
Later nights will include abstraction and psychedelia in the formation
of
intentional political communities, with films by David Cronenberg, Tony
Conrad, and Ira Cohen; the alogical as a narcissistic strategy in
contemporary video work; and alchemy and the transformation of heavy
material.
___________________________________________________
2. Films to be screened:
Marie Menken Eye Music in Red Major
Chick Strand Kristallnacht
Bradley Eros Musique plastique
Stan Brakhage Commingled Containers
Coleen Fitzgibbon fm/trcs
Yamazaki Hiroshi Heliography
Takahiko Iimura Ai (Love)
Bradley Eros Aerodynamics of the Black Sun
Kawanaka Nobuhiro Kick the World
Marie Menken Glimpse of the Garden
Marie Menken Hurry! Hurry!
Shuji Terayama Butterflies
Stan Brakhage The Wold Shadow
Chris Welsby Seven Days
___________________________________________________
3. Topics to be discussed/not discussed:
The Dutch Tulip Bubble
Robert Smithson’s Yucatan writings (1969)
Lacan’s concept of the Sinthome
Aeon: ecology, the Timeless
Jean Epstein and Magnification
Marie Menken
Aby Warburg
William Faulkner
Visions of “structure”: Hollis Frampton
Daniil Kharms and his Circle
The Belonging Kind: Mike Kelley and human morphology
The Passage: night, day, Chris Marker
Fascism and the vitalism of the object: appropriation, Klaus Theleweit,
nouveau, Capital
___________________________________________________
4. About Brian McCarthy
This evening is organized and presented by Brian McCarthy. Brian is a
curator and videographer living in Brooklyn. He has worked for Anthology
Film Archives, EAI, and the Filmmaker’s Cooperative and has been
involved
with the experimental film and video community in New York City since
1999.
___________________________________________________
5. About Marie Menken
Marie Menken (born Marie Menkevicius, New York City, 1909) was an
experimental filmmaker whose role as an inspiration for Stan Brakhage,
Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol (whom she taught how to use a 16mm
camera)
provided the material for Martina Kudlacek’s 2006 documentary Notes on
Marie Menken. Her relationship with Willard Maas, in their house in
Brooklyn Heights, served as the basis for Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf.
__________________________________________________
16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th / 5th fl.
New York, NY 10004
for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org
TRAINS:
4,5 Bowling Green
R,W Whitehall
2,3 Wall Street
J,M Broad Street
1,9 South Ferry
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.